Abstract

In recent years, the search for easily and widely tunable coherent sources has generated great interest in the development of optical parametric amplifiers (OPA). We are presently developing a subpicosecond degenerate OPA based on the nonlinear crystal BBO. We show how this OPA can amplify small signals with a gain of up to 10⁴ during the time that the pump and signal overlap in the crystal.

© 1994 Optical Society of America